Wedding Seating Charts 101

Planning who will sit where at your wedding can be a huge headache. With that said, here are some tips to help make creating your seating chart a little easier to deal with:

• Take your time. Don't think you'll be able to complete this task the night before your wedding; it could take a while. Taking your time to make sure all guests are in the right spot will create a more pleasant reception for all.
• Categorize. Are you keeping a master guest list? If so, group each guest in of the following categories: wedding party, groom's family, bride's family, coupled/married friends, single friends, guests with kids and people with known, lasting conflicts.
• Create a plan. Take out a sheet of paper, and plan how the tables will be arranged, and include the bride or head table (or you can find a template online). If you'll be determining where each table will be placed, put yourself in a position where all guests can see you, leave enough space for dancing, and consider foot traffic.
• Begin with you. The first thing you need to do is decide who will be joining you and your new spouse at the head table. Some couples include the entire bridal party, some sit with their parents and others sit by themselves. It's completely up to you and depends on your venue as well. If you choose to have the wedding party sit separately, consider putting them all at one or two tables with their significant others.

For more tips on creating your seating chart, check out Seating Charts 101 - Putting Everyone in Their Place.

Steps Taken in Drafting a Wedding Budget

By Alexa Ondra

After the fairly dust has settled and the fact that you’re engaged to the most wonderful person in the world, there is now need to sit down to set some financial parameters and form a wedding budget.

There are ten most common steps when forming a budget and these include:

Step 1: Have a real long chat with your partner. Discuss what kind of wedding you both want, your dreams, visions, indoor or outdoor, laid back, buffet among others.

Step 2: Make a list of what you’ll need. Each wedding is different but if you want a standard wedding, get the budget from friends who have been there, or wedding meeting minutes to see the list. You don’t have to follow it though, feel free to create your own traditions.

Step 3: Priotise this list. What means the most to you? Is the cake more important to you than music? Select what you want to be handled first.

Step 4: If you’re not fully funding your own wedding and introduction ceremony, meet with friends and or Key friends to get a picture of what they are willing to contribute. Be nice even if they are not contributing financially.

Step 5: Analyse your own finances. How much do you have available or how much can you make available in the near future without going broke? Bear in mind that average Ugandan wedding costs sh15m and above.

Step 6: Come up with a cash plan to raise what you need whether on a personal note or from friends.

Step 7: Start vendor window shopping. Compare prices and do a full background check using other couple’s experiences.

Step 8: Go back to the drawing board; compare estimated costs versus real costs found and adjust accordingly or re-plan.

Step 9: Appoint a finance manager specifically for the wedding incase you are poor at financial management. It has to be a trustworthy person with a knack for accounts.

Step 10: Review your budget after purchases every two days to make sure you’re on track.

How To Look Beautiful on Your Wedding Day

By Julie Ndagire

It is every bride’s dream to look her Most beautiful on the special day but as we all know, weddings come with a lot of preparations like choosing a decorator, caterer, venue etc and so if one doesn’t have a wedding planner, it is easy to forget yourself until it is too late.
Do you want to get in shape? Do you know what hairstyle you want? What abot the make-up? Take time to plan for your beauty regimen ahead of time so that you look your greatest on your wedding day. Make a time table.

6 months to go
Start exercising, jog three times a day, eat right, go to the gym twice for aerobics classes.
It is around this time that you should visit a skin care specialist especially if you have problems with your skin.

3 months to the Wedding
If you want glowing skin on your special day, start a good cleansing, toning and moisturizing routine. You should start at this time to have monthly facials. It is advisable for the bride to get at least four facials before the big day.

If you haven’t got a hairdresser by this time, you should start looking at potential salons. You also need to book in advance because with the number of people getting married these days, you may have to book months before to avoid disappointments. Most salons require 50% deposit on booking.

You should also chose a make-up artist at this time and try on the make-up you want to use on your wedding day.

1 month to the wedding
This is the time to make the final decisions on hairstyles and make-up.

2 weeks to the wedding
Get your final hair cut. No more experimenting at this stage. Continue to eat right, load up vegetables, fruits and reduce on sweets and fatty foods.
Drink lots of water to re-hydrate your skin even as you make last preparations for the rest of the wedding ceremony. Continue to exfoliate and moisturize.
Confirm appointments with your salon and make-up person.

1 week to the wedding
Get a bikini line and underarm wax. Do not drink too much at the Kasiki or any other parties before the wedding because alcohol can have lasting effects on your skin.

Day before the wedding
Drink lots of water
Get a final facial, a professional pedicure and manicure, Take a long, relaxing bath. Get your hair washed and treated.

On Your wedding day
Arrive early at the salon to give the glamour squad enough time to work on your and your bridal entourage.

How to Use SuperGiftPlace Coupon Code

Every now and then, we offer you a coupon code for an extra discount at SuperGiftPlace.com. The code applies to your order at http://www.supergiftplace.com only, excluding our sister sites such as our sister Weddingstar site and the Aspen Shops.

After you select items to your shopping cart, you are at the checkout page as shown above. Enter our coupon code Super10 in the Voucher field and click the Recalculate button for an additional 10% discount. You may make your payment via Paypal or Google Checkout or just your credit card.

Visit us at http://www.supergiftplace.com. Contact us at support@supergiftplace.com if you have any other questions.

3 Ways To Promote Your Event On Twitter

By Daphne Bousquet

If you want to market your seminar with social media, Twitter is a valuable resource for creating buzz, raising your event's profile and yes, even getting some butts in the seats. Here are 3 tips for marketing your workshop or seminar on Twitter:

1. Tweet Your Way To More Attendees
Create at least 10 different tweets with a link to your event registration page. Schedule your tweets so you have about 5 throughout the day. Twitter moves fast, and when people follow hundreds of thousands of people, they will not see every tweet.

But be careful, you don't want your entire tweet stream to be about your event. You still need to give out tips, retweet other people and interact with people. 


Share some other resources in between, like articles and blog posts. If it is all about you and your event, you will turn people off because it becomes spammy. And that is a no no. Nobody likes spam.

Enlist some of your friends to help you promote your Tweets to their followers or retweet your tweets. You reach even more people, and since it doesn't come from you, it's not spam. Your event becomes a valuable resource that someone else wants to share with his followers.

2. Use A Hashtag
Create a hashtag for your event. If you are not familiar with what a hashtag is, it is the pound or number sign (#). You follow that with an abbreviation of the name of your workshop. Hashtags can't be too long because on Twitter, you only have 120 characters. Space is of the essence, so keep it short.

You add the tag to all the tweets about your event so that you can search for them easily and they can stand out among your followers. Then when other people start using it and the hashtag shows up everywhere, it becomes like a party, and people do not want to be left out.

3. Create Community With A Twitter List
Create a Twitter list of everyone who signs up for your event. That is a great way of getting people to interact with each other before they even get to your seminar. Your potential attendees see who else is registered, and that becomes a selling tool in itself.

What you do is create the list in Twitter or in Hootsuite because you can use that to create Twitter lists as well. Every time you have a new registration, you add them to your Twitter list. Then you make sure you publicize your list.

You can send emails to the people who have registered, encouraging them to follow everyone on your Twitter list so they can start networking before the event. You can even tweet about your list and encourage your followers to see who is coming to the workshop. Tell them to be there, too; you'll be able to network with all these great people.

In addition, you are fostering a community around your workshop. And people always want to belong to a community.

If you want more strategies on how to market your seminar on Twitter, Linked In, Facebook, Google+ and YouTube, check out "How to Market a Seminar on Social Media," a step-by-step program designed to get the most out of your social media time.

Daphne Bousquet, CMP uses her 20+ years of event planning experience to create profitable event strategies and implementation for coaches, entrepreneurs, speakers and self-employed professionals that want to grow their businesses with workshops and seminars. She is the creator of the How to Get the Butts In The Seats Of Your Next Workshop Or Seminar System, a unique digital course that teaches you how to fill your events with your ideal audience. Visit her online at EventStrategySolutions.com. 




[Photo Credit]

Wedding Cakes

There are various types of wedding cakes one can opt for. Chocolate, rosy flowered, castles, fruit shaped among others.
Below are some shapes of wedding cakes

Rossy-wedding-Cake

Castle-Shaped-wedding -Cake

Flowerly-Wedding-Cake

Lady shaped wedding  Cake

simple white wedding cake

Real Wedding - Neela and Shawn

It's been a while since we have done a real wedding, but when we received the images from this wedding, we knew it was time to start again!

Neela and Shawn were married last October at the new Ottawa Convention Center and it was an affair that could rival any Bollywood movie- glitz, bold colours and of course the happy ending.

We absolutely loved working with this couple especially since we were lucky enough to not only plan one ceremony with them, but two!  The morning started with a traditional Sikh ceremony followed by a  Catholic ceremony which meant that Neela had two gorgeous dresses to show off. 

A full day for sure, Shawn made his entrance atop a white horse, guests were treated to an Indian feast for brunch, Canadian fare for dinner and a stocked candy bar that was sure to include the grooms favourite - Beemans gum!

Thanks to our friends Jodi and Paul at Horton Photography, 

we were able to share some of our favourite shots with all of you.

Much love to Neela and Shawn!